From the Frontlines

Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide. At least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel; the Committee to Protect Journalists says it’s the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented. In conflicts around the world, it’s war reporters who write the first draft of history. But getting to the front lines, finding the truth, and reporting it is easier said than done. Today on the show: war reporters, and what’s at stake if they can’t do their jobs. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Speaker 01

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• 0:50Speaker 02

  I still remember every single time that one of my friends were targeted.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  We're just getting some breaking news now that a journalist has been killed in an Israeli army attack.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Some of them, they got targeted, their houses, with their families.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Gaza bureau chief Wa'el Dahdourh lost his wife, two children, and a grandchild.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Others, they were sleeping in tents inside of the hospitals.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  News cameras were already trained on the Nassar Hospital after an initial Israeli strike killed several people. A short time later, a second Israeli strike hit as first responders and journalists had already rushed to the scene.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Targeting A P, N P C, and international media like Al Jazeera and others.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  You just feel that you're gonna be the next person to be covered with white shrouds, and your own colleagues is taking photos of you, taking you to the cemetery, and after that, returning to keep reporting and saying, "Allah yarhamu", which means "Rest in peace".

• 2:08Speaker 02

  When journalists are silenced, the truth is gonna be buried with them.

• 2:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is NS Baba.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  NS Baba, NPR News, Gaza City.

• 2:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Since 2020, NS has been reporting for NPR from Gaza, where he was born and raised.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  The Israelis started to open fire on all the people in the city.

• 2:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Like the 2 million other Palestinians in Gaza, NS has lived the past two years facing bombardment, displacement, and starvation. What an independent UN inquiry has concluded is genocide.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Often, I'm reporting with no protective gears. Because your own protective gears, maybe it's going to make you more of a target for the Israelis. We move quickly. We move in foot. Sometimes, we hide our press vest.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide, from Mexico to China to Ukraine, Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen.

• 3:05Speaker 06

  The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the killing of 31 Yemeni journalists in an Israeli airstrike last week was the second deadliest single attack on the press ever recorded by the committee.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Reporters Without Borders estimates that at least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. That's more than were killed in the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan combined. And it isn't even close. The Committee to Protect Journalists says it's the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented.

• 3:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  And almost all of them are Palestinian. Although some foreign journalists have embedded with the Israeli military, Israel has barred foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza for the last two years. The vast majority of reporting you here comes from local journalists like NS.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  But even under bombardment, we continue to report here in Gaza after.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  This is the reality of Gaza, if you can hear it.

• 4:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Was that an explosion that I just heard?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  A helicopter is opening fire on the houses.

• 4:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Where are-- how close are you to that? Are you in a safe place?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  There is no safe place in Gaza, and there is nothing called, where are you exactly safe or not? Because bullets do not differentiate, and bullets do not know that's me working for an American outlet.

• 4:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'll be honest, I was pretty concerned for Enes at this point. But he seemed almost unfazed. Death is a daily reality, a daily possibility for him. Throughout nearly two years of war, Enes has run toward airstrike after airstrike to bear witness to the aftermath and report back to you and me and millions of listeners, something that reporters have been doing for over a century now.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  This is Trafalgar Square.

• 5:07Speaker 06

  The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren. A year of witnessing the ferocious war machine that the Bosnian Serb commander had unleashed.

• 5:16Speaker 07

  Hundreds of Taliban overran Barmatol a week ago.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  He did not like my reporting.

• 5:21Speaker 07

  Our journey begins in Port Sudan. Russian forces are trying to pressure Gostin Ternovka from three sides. We saw Masab's lifeless body lying on the floor next to the fridge.

• 5:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Is this the press [bleep] coming here again? The press again, so they can [bleep] strike here again. Get the [bleep] out of here. I'm Rend Abdelfatah.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we'll travel from the marshes of Vietnam to the Iraqi desert and back to the rubble-filled streets of Gaza to explore how journalists navigate the pressure of politics and propaganda to report from the front lines of war.

• 6:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  How they go about reporting the truth to people who may not even want to hear it. And what's at stake when they can't tell those stories.

• 6:16Speaker 07

  This is Cal from Chicago, and you're listening to Throughline. You are the history class I always wanted.

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• 7:55Speaker 07

  War in South Vietnam. An ugly war in a far-off place to which the United States is deeply committed.

• 8:05Speaker 07

  Part one. The uncensored war.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  It's 1964. U.S. military advisers have already been in Vietnam for over a decade.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  By the spring of 1964, the Vietcong had reached the strength of an estimated 60,000 troops and controlled nearly 68% of South Vietnam's villages and settlements.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Successive U.S. administrations said they were in Vietnam to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia. And things weren't going well. But most Americans weren't paying much attention to the conflict.

• 8:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  That begins in a very sort of slow way that initially was largely ignored. This is Susan Carruthers, historian at the University of Warwick and author of the book, The Media at War.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Jim Crow, political assassinations, voting rights, those domestic issues were much more top of mind. But then.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  On the night of August 4th, 1964, President Johnson appeared on national television. Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf

• 9:15Speaker 01

  of Tonkin. Following a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin involving an exchange of fire between US and North Vietnamese ships, Congress, with near unanimous support in the House and Senate, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. And suddenly, the draft was ramped up.

• 9:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  And more and more thousands of American men sent there.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Which led more Americans to ask questions about the war. And news outlets responded.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy.

• 10:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at and that a few houses were made to pay.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Film reels would be flown to Tokyo for quick editing and developing, and then flown to the US. There were three main networks broadcasting news from Vietnam, ABC, NBC, and CBS. And the big publications like The New York Times and Time Magazine also sent their reporters there.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Blue didn't want to come to Vietnam, and he'd much rather be a businessman than a soldier. But right now, he's in charge of the lives of 21 men.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Most of the reporting focused on the US perspective, American soldiers, policy, military strategy.

• 10:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  We might see Vietnamese peasants in all. Obvious anguish, distressed, grieving. But mostly, the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcasts were silent.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  A flurry of alternative and international media outlets were also reporting from Vietnam. Many staff correspondents were headquartered in Saigon.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  The full fury of the war has scarcely touched Saigon. It attracts visitors, GIs on leave, and even American tourists anxious for a feel of the war.

• 11:31Speaker 07

  I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party on top of the roof of the Beth Hotel, the Carabelle. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things. You'd think you were at home, you know. But then, over the edge of the parapet, you could see these flares coming up. And the question was whether it was incoming or outgoing. You would never know till it happened.

• 12:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Frances Fitzgerald. She goes by Frankie. In 1966, Frankie flew to Vietnam sort of on a whim. She was 26, from a wealthy family, and curious about the world. So she decided to take a break from her local reporting job in New York to travel to Southeast Asia, wanting to see the place where her father had deployed during World War II. She went to Thailand, Laos, and eventually landed in Vietnam.

• 12:31Speaker 07

  I thought I would just spend a month there, do an article or two, pay my airfare back. But when I got there, I found I couldn't leave. I mean, I'd never seen a war before, of course, and it was all too fascinating.

• 12:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie says she never really felt unsafe, even as one of the only women reporting there.

• 12:54Speaker 07

  Some of the American soldiers and the Vietnamese soldiers were kind of furious I was there because they thought they would have to protect me.

• 13:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which I could understand. And some just felt that their macho was diminished because a woman was there. So I didn't like that. But journalists were allowed to go anywhere. They could go out with the troops. Nobody was holding their hands or stopping them. Unlike in previous conflicts like World War II, the US military made a conscious decision not to formally censor journalists. They saw Vietnam as more of a limited conflict, not a full-scale war.

• 13:37Speaker 07

  Every evening, a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk.

• 13:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie arrived with a still film camera and a typewriter she'd packed into her suitcase. And as a freelance journalist, she could pretty much report whatever stories she wanted. It's just occurred to me that the thing that was missing was that the American high command knew nothing about the Vietnamese.

• 14:05Speaker 07

  Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of new houses into a maze of thatched huts and tin-roofed shacks called Bui Phat, one of the oldest of the refugee quarters.

• 14:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  She got articles printed in The Village Voice, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine, centering the Vietnamese perspective.

• 14:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  So walk me through, like, how did you actually go about getting that perspective? Because I'm assuming you didn't speak Vietnamese? Well, I found, I mean, I found several interpreters along the way. That wasn't hard to do because people wanted to do that. You make a lot of money that way. And how would you know if someone was a good interpreter if you don't speak Vietnamese? I could feel it.

• 15:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie would travel around the South Vietnamese countryside with her interpreter, hoping to connect with people. But she wasn't always welcomed with open arms.

• 15:09Speaker 07

  Americans do not normally walk through the slums, not the real slums, like those in the outlying areas.

• 15:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  She remembers going into a community where refugees were living in makeshift homes, built on planks atop a marsh. They were angry at being displaced from.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Their villages and put in this marsh.

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth.

• 15:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  And suddenly.

• 15:35Speaker 07

  A pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back. It is followed by a hail of stones.

• 15:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  She began getting pelted with stones.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  I was sort of offended by it in a sense that I thought, what have I done? But I could very well understand if I had to live in such a place, I perhaps would be throwing stones too.

• 15:59Speaker 07

  These refugees lose their lands, their families, their ancestral homes, and the structure of their lives.

• 16:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie says the key to finally connecting with people was just continuing to show up.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  They would realize that you were not going to come and blow up the village.

• 16:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  How did you approach fact checking? Either things that the local Vietnamese people were telling you or the things that the US military or the Vietnamese local police were telling you?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Oh, sometimes it was absolutely impossible. You just have to do the best you could, find other sources that said the same thing. I think we're given certainly away by our editors. There was a rule that you couldn't prove anything in a story by quoting a Vietnamese.

• 16:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow, so it was pretty explicit that if you, if your source was a Vietnamese person versus an American commander, let's say.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  The two statements are not equal.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Not equal, not equal.

• 17:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  And there were times when she felt the reality she was witnessing would be too unbelievable to her readers.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  I went to see the civilian hospital. And then, you know, I see all these Vietnamese on beds outside their rooms with terrible burns, which they had from napalm.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  You know, to describe it right here is almost impossible for me. I was so. Awful. I didn't know what to do.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  I reported some of it, but just not the really gruesome details.

• 17:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Why did you leave the most gruesome details out, do you think?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Well, because I felt that it wouldn't be credible, really. I didn't have an organization behind me.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Everybody had this internal censor, which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this?

• 18:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Is journalism's role to push the conversation if that's where the truth is leading? Or is it to meet people where they are until they're ready to hear the sort of bigger ecstatic truth?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's probably to do the first. But at the expense of not having it printed at all.

• 18:41Speaker 07

  To one people, the war would appear each day, compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room. The explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  In 1972, Frankie published a series of articles in The New Yorker detailing her years of reporting from Vietnam that were then turned into a book called Fire in the Lake, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

• 19:08Speaker 07

  For the other people, the war would come one day out of a clear blue sky. In a few minutes, it would be over. The bombs, released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions, would leave only the debris and the dead behind.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  It was the first major book by an American profiling Vietnam, its history, its people, the impact of the war on them. At the time, Frankie described the book as a, quote, "first draft of history."

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Frankie's book was part of a chorus of reporting that had been fueling a growing anti-war movement for years.

• 19:53Speaker 07

  So many Americans are not only opposed to the war, but vehemently out on the streets.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Public opinion had dramatically begun to shift going into 1968. US troop numbers were at an all-time high. And then came the Tet Offensive. Communist forces swept through more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, towns, and villages. American and South Vietnamese troops fought them back, and the North suffered huge losses.

• 20:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was militarily a win for the US. But optically, it was a resounding defeat. Reporters sent back photos that shook the American public. In one, a South Vietnamese soldier stands over a North Vietnamese prisoner, pistol in hand, carrying out an execution. Another shows bloodstains, bullet holes, and dead bodies at the US Embassy.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Susan Carruthers says, for much of the war in Vietnam, the news media...

• 20:53Speaker 07

  was absolutely beholden to this Cold War template that the United States was there to try to prop up the league at South Vietnam. And that changes only really after the consensus on Capitol Hill itself has started to break down. Editors are more willing to sort of push the boundaries of the sayable, the showable.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  About a month after the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for CBS Evening News, known then as the most trusted man in America, recorded this broadcast after a trip to Vietnam.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best...

• 21:51Speaker 01

  They could.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  After hearing this broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America. And within weeks, he decided to not run for reelection.

• 22:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was seen by many as a turning point. News coverage became overwhelmingly more negative. Though the war would continue for another seven years, until 1975, with the defeated US withdrawing the last of its combat troops two years earlier, journalists were credited with and blamed for ending the war. They had risked life and limb, often without the safety of a military escort, to report the truth. More than 60 journalists paid the ultimate price for it.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  And Vietnam came to be known as the uncensored war.

• 22:43Speaker 07

  The obvious lesson that the US military and the British military, looking very carefully at all of this, learn is that they should never leave the media to be uncensored in any future conflict that they're fighting.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Coming up, war reporting gets a makeover fit for TV.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Hello, this is Dominic Malone from the oil fields of Douglas, Wyoming. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 23:21Speaker 00

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• 24:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part Two. Embedded.

• 24:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's April 2003, a year and a half after 9/11. An overturned truck smolders on the side of the road, the bitter scent of diesel filling the air. The metallic growl of armored vehicles churns through the sand. Buildings pockmarked with bullet holes sit empty. Cruise missiles streak across the night sky. Operation Iraqi Freedom is underway.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Breaking news yet again. Southwest or west of the city of Baghdad, that is where we find Walt again. Walt, good afternoon there. What do you have? Hello, Bill. Serious American casualties in the battle for Baghdad this morning.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  It's great sleep deprivation. There's no privacy. You're in an armored vehicle or a Humvee, as I was in a Humvee.

• 25:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Walter Rogers.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Army sources have told CNN that the casualties are at least six wounded.

• 25:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's a retired journalist who spent decades traveling from one conflict zone to the next, much of that time reporting on air for CNN. He flew to Afghanistan during the Soviet war there, Sarajevo during the Bosnian genocide, southern Lebanon during Israel's occupation.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  It was Winston Churchill who said, "There's nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed." We just heard an inc., what the hell? Can you hear me?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  We just heard something shooting.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  While embedded in Iraq, Walter went where the American soldiers went, living with troops, reporting under the jurisdiction of the military. And his dispatches often ended with this editor's note, quote, "This report was written in accordance with Pentagon ground rules, allowing so-called embedded reporting, in which journalists join deployed troops. Among the rules accepted by all participating news organizations is an agreement not to disclose sensitive operational details." Embedding is, with whatever limitations you ascribe to it, embedding is always good because you get to see.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  I mean, you can tell propaganda stuff when it raises its ugly head.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  The main reason given by the Bush administration for the invasion was that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. A claim that many media outlets, including NPR, repeated in the lead up to the invasion, and that would turn out to not be true.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Now, looking back, some people will say the media war correspondents who were reporting very much from the perspective of the US military and giving weight to what the administration was saying. Were there reasons for going to Iraq? Some people now say, well, those journalists, they all helped sell the war. As someone who was in Iraq at that time, reporting, what do you think of that? Well, I'm reminded of an incident in Iraq at the end of the second or third week. And one of the things that I recall was that

• 28:00Speaker 00

  there were people who were trumpeting that first wave as a great invasion.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  That the Iraqis would welcome Americans with open arms. We would ride through in convoys in those Iraqi villages. And there was no celebration. There was no welcoming the Americans there. And the public didn't want to hear that.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  So you can't tell people things they don't want to hear.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  But did you ever feel like if the truth is something they don't want to hear, it still needs to be said because it's it's the truth?

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Yes, and a pox on management of the company you work for and tell you they don't want to hear what you're reporting.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Because it didn't comply comply with the White House version of events.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  Wow. What what did that actually mean in terms of the reporting?

• 28:53Speaker 02

  I can't go into much specifics on this.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Sometimes they would say, well, the White House won't like this. So they tempered your reporting.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  So they would say, take this out, take that out. No, we don't want this shot.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yes, don't say that.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Hmm, wow. I mean, would you use the word censorship?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I would. There was a definite effort in those days to skew the reporting of the reporter in the field and make it conform to what they felt the administration wanted.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  We reached out to CNN about this and they had no comment.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn't the first time the news media was accused by media watch groups and some journalists themselves of selling a war on behalf of the US government. It wasn't the first time journalists were restricted in their coverage either. In fact, embedding was actually set up as a way to offer more access to the front lines because the Pentagon had received such strong criticism for restricting access to journalists during the first invasion of Iraq a little over a decade earlier. And an explosive development near the Persian Gulf. In 1991, the US led a multinational invasion of Iraq

• 30:17Speaker 01

  after Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed its oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait. This set off the first Gulf War.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Of course, there had been a whole revolution in communications technology, the so-called CNN effect.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  During the initial strikes on Baghdad, CNN was the only network reporting live.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Beamed into your living room in real time.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  On camera.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Twenty-four seven.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  To tens of millions of viewers in the US and around the world. There's a lot of fire going up and as I say. And it put CNN on the map in a big way.

• 30:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Historian Susan Carruthers says this is when the US military.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Employed a sort of full panoply of measures that will be wheeled out again in Afghanistan and Iraq of sort of forming the press into pools and having briefings, trying to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

• 31:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  She says the irony is, this was the early days of the internet, and new technologies like email and satellite phones were making it logistically more possible than ever for a journalist to do what Frankie Fitzgerald had done in Vietnam, independently report from the battlefield.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Still, most journalists chose to follow the military's rules, and the few who didn't.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  They were liable to be accused of treachery, often by fellow journalists.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  The BBC, for example.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Was branded the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation by some British journalistic critics. And I think that's another very powerful disciplinary force, how other journalists often are so keen to whip their colleagues into line if they think that they are reporting too far from the other side. So those sort of pressures to toe the line, to report from within a very tightly bounded patriotic nationalist framework, I think are remarkably persistent.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  When the first Gulf War came to an end in 1991, and journalists were reflecting on the restrictions the US military had imposed during the war.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Many journalists and news organizations say this was a devastating defeat for the First Amendment. We let ourselves be suckered into these arrangements.

• 32:41Speaker 07

  Then that critique is trotted out again during the much longer conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• 32:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  The pressure that war reporters contend with is really complex. They might embed with troops because it's safer. It might give them access to places that could otherwise be out of reach. They often have to weigh whether their reporting could put troops in danger, the same troops they're often traveling with, living with. And if you're a foreign correspondent, then you might be in a place where your country is the one dropping the bombs or funding the weapons.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.

• 33:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Susan says there's another big factor in all of this.

• 33:26Speaker 06

  All of this was brought upon us in a single day.

• 33:30Speaker 07

  The incredible power of the word, the label terrorism.

• 33:38Speaker 06

  The war on terror extends beyond just a shadowy terrorist network. The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein.

• 33:50Speaker 07

  If everyone sort of shares this idea that there are illegitimate forms of violence.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  In today's world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage.

• 34:04Speaker 07

  And there are legitimate ones that we in our uniforms exercise and have a monopoly over, and then there are opponents who are terrorists.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Now a different threat challenges our world: radical Islamic terrorism.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  That powerful delegitimizing tag does an awful lot of work, it seems to me, to bring people quickly to heel, to silence voices, to cause people to think very hard about whether they really want to show or say certain things.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Where does allegiance lie? I think that's what it all boils down to, isn't it? Questions of how one appraises responsibility to whom exactly? And perhaps another even more diffuse layer of responsibility, which is what do humans owe to fellow humans in the face of catastrophic human suffering?

• 35:05Speaker 07

  You don't want anybody to die.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  There's no joy in seeing people writhing on the ground or smelling their rotting corpses. A lot of war reporters suffer from substance abuse, PTSD, and a sense of powerlessness.

• 35:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  So how did you cope with that reality? You don't forget everything you learned in Sunday School. You look for the humanity which shines through. You cover Palestinians. You cover Iraqi refugees, Balkan refugees,

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Serbs, Croatians, you know. You always see the humanity, even in the person you call the enemy.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  That's why you have locals working with you and for you

• 35:57Speaker 00

  and keeping you honest.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  And you're ever in their debt.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Foreign reporters often work with local people to translate, explain the culture, drive, gain access, stay safe, and find and report stories.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Iraq and Afghanistan are good cases in point.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  With microphone and camera in hand, they are there for every skirmish.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Ever more of that work was offloaded on to local reporters as those places became more dangerous and as American coalition forces tended to retreat. Did you film that car bomb? To the relative

• 36:35Speaker 07

  Safety of their fortified bases.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  More than 200 media and media support staff, most of them Iraqis, have been killed since 2003. Dozens more have been kidnapped or arrested.

• 36:49Speaker 07

  The people who are really doing the hard work of reporting on the wars, people who are much more poorly paid than a British or American journalist, who are taking on different kinds of dangers with incredible bravery and commitment in their own countries for whom the stakes are exponentially higher.

• 37:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  My story here is not only about being a journalist or a survivor. I'm a witness.

• 37:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  We return to Gaza with Anna Spaba.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  I'm a witness to where the light turned into darkness.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  This is Christopher from St. Louis, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. With their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no antibiotics-ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3 at Whole Foods Market.

• 38:30Speaker 00

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• 38:56Speaker 07

  Part three. A dual burden.

• 39:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  A few weeks ago, just before the invasion of Gaza City began, I was trying to get in touch with Enes Baba, NPR's reporter on the ground there. He's one of the only remaining Palestinian journalists working full-time for an American outlet. As you can imagine, nothing is easy in Gaza. And even patching a call-through wasn't as simple as dialing a number.

• 39:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Israeli strikes on infrastructure have made internet connections spotty in Gaza. So we couldn't use apps like Signal or WhatsApp to make the call. And regular calls in Gaza are monitored by Israel. The first few times, the call would just drop. Then I got a few rings. One time, my call was passed into a random conversation. Hello? A few times, I got this message. Hello. Amistad de la ficat el enero de cuba. Puga. Hello. The subscriber you have dialed is disconnected. And finally, 20 or so attempts later, Enes called me from that phone number.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Hello? Amalia?

• 40:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yes. It's an update.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 40:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm trying to call this number that you called from, and it goes directly to "call ended."

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Welcome to Gaza.

• 40:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was kind of surreal talking to Enes. I was sitting in my closet, where I record because it's quiet. And it occurred to me that it was kind of amazing that I suddenly felt like I was there with him.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  I'm sitting here to see the only place that we can see that we are still alive. To see that there is hope, there is life, which is the beach, the sea.

• 40:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, is that what I'm hearing in the background, is the waves?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yes, this is the waves, and at the same time, the wind of the sea.

• 40:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  So in front of you, you're looking out at water, at the waves. And behind you, what is the scene look like?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  In front of me, yes, there is the sea, the water. But also, we do have the Israeli navy craft. It's so close to us, it opens fire on us on daily basis.

• 41:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  So if you tried to go in the water, they could open fire on you?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Even if you wanna just dip your own toes in the water. Even fishing is prohibited here in Gaza. This is what I see in front of me. But behind me, there is a newly bombed towers that's been bombed today by the Israelis. The destruction, it's daily thing. The street I walked yesterday might be bombed today. Maybe the building that's my friends is living in can be bombed. It creates inside of you a dual burden. Being both a journalist and a survivor that's living in Gaza itself. You are documenting suffering and at the same time, you are experiencing it yourself.

• 41:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  What does that look like for you to both live in these conditions? Under constant bombardment, struggling to find food and also reporting, you know, for NPR?

• 42:11Speaker 02

  I woke at around 5 to 6 a.m. every single day to try to collect my own water. It's the only thing to find clean, drinkable water. I need to find internet in order to understand exactly what happened overnight. If there is an air strikes and if there is a death toll that's being at one of the hospitals, which by the way, we don't have a real hospitals. Most of the hospitals in Gaza City is totally destructed or partially destructed and partially functioning.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  In the waiting hall of the patient's friend's hospital in Gaza City, dozens of mothers cradled their infants.

• 42:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Israel is limiting and controlling the entry of pretty much everything going into Gaza. Fuel, medical supplies, food, even medical staff.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  From the hospital going to the morgue.

• 43:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Every day as part of his reporting and as counts the dead at the morgue.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  And from that going maybe to do a story about the humans and how the Gazans is being living.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  She had a says we haven't seen bread for ages. We wait for charity meals. If they come, we eat. She has not eaten in a week, she says.

• 43:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Enes told me on many days, he does all of this with almost no food in his system. Maybe a bowl of lentil soup or a few pieces of falafel.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Now you're consuming your own life with each step. But when you are a journalist, you cannot stop. It's that adrenaline rush. It's that duty. It's that job that you dedicated yourself since day one that you are gonna document every single thing that's happening in Gaza in a neutral way. And I'm repeating that, in a neutral way. You cannot even be, as a journalist here in Gaza, you cannot be one sided. Always you need to tell the truth. I'm passionate about the truth. If there is a strike and people that are being killed, okay, from a local rocket, from the Palestinians, I say that the Palestinians being killed by a local rocket.

• 44:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  I mean, that's such an incredible burden in so many ways, but also responsibility that you and other journalists in Gaza have carried, especially since October 7th, when foreign journalists were barred from entering Gaza.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  More than 200 media outlets all over the world, and even the Foreign Press Association and the Committee to Protect the Journalists, they issued a statement asking Israel why you don't allow the foreign journalists to enter.

• 44:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  The headline of the statement reads, quote, "At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed." And then demands three things. Quote, "The protection of Palestinian journalists, the foreign press be granted independent access to the Gaza Strip, and that governments across the world host Palestinian journalists seeking evacuation from Gaza."

• 45:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Israel's Foreign Ministry called the appeal a "political manifesto against Israel" and said, "The reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads."

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Trust me when I say this: what we are reporting here from Gaza is only 10% from the reality. There is too many airstrikes, there is too many massacres, there is non-stop a humanitarian crisis that we are going through, and we as journalists in Gaza, after two years of reporting non-stop, we need our own brothers, our own colleagues to enter Gaza to help us.

• 45:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  How do you make sense of, you know, when you hear about "another journalist has been killed"?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Maybe I'm sorry to say this, but I hate to show my own emotions, especially when I'm talking about a colleague. Not because I'm now I'm heartless, no. We still practice our own humanity every single day and believe in our own sometimes, and maybe most of the times, we show sympathy with the hostages in Gaza because they are living the same bombardments, the same famine with us in Gaza here. But just imagine that you are going to the funerals every single day.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  Entire families killed in Israeli attacks are being buried here on the grounds of the hospital.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  But this time is different. Most of them are my friends. Most of them, they were journalists, fathers, mothers, sisters.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Adel, Marwa, Abdul Karim, Mohammed, Nahmud, Tasneem, Sham, another two.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  I'm thanking Allah that I'm not married. I'm thanking Allah that I don't have children. Because having that responsibility on my own shoulders is truly gonna be the hardest thing in my life to live.

• 47:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's something that...

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Okay, Rund, Rund, Rund, we need to end the call at the meantime because it's being monitored and at the same time it's being tracked.

• 47:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  So I need to end the call and call you back, okay?

• 47:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was hearing beeps on the line. There are various theories on why things like that happen, including weakened infrastructure. Anyway, a few minutes later, Enes called me back.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Hello, can you hear me?

• 47:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  I asked him if Israeli surveillance had ever interfered with his reporting.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  When I was in Rafah, in my own house, a quad captor, a quad captor is a drone that holds a gun and explosive and at the same time a microphone.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  It came, let's say, 50 centimeters away from my own window and they started to speak to me and demanded me to evacuate the area. Before that, an Israeli official called me and he told me that you are in a military zone and you keep reporting and they want you to go out of here. Otherwise, you're gonna put yourself in risk.

• 48:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Risk has always been part of the job for war reporters and it's never been higher than for journalists in Gaza, who are being killed at record levels. Israel also accuses some Gazan journalists of being, quote, terrorists. The Committee to Protect Journalists has said, quote, "The IDF has a longstanding pattern of making unsubstantiated claims that many of the journalists they have deliberately killed in Gaza were terrorists."

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Without social media, no one will ever know anything.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  About what is happening in Gaza.

• 48:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Social media has given the world a more unfiltered stream of images and videos from Gaza, pushing the conversation. We were seeing the word genocide being used in social media reels well before the UN Commission issued its conclusion. Many US-based media outlets, including NPR, do not call what's happening in Gaza a genocide. Israel has rejected the findings of the UN Commission, accusing Commission members of being, quote, "Hamas proxies with openly anti-Semitic positions."

• 49:29Speaker 02

  It took 60,000 people to be killed, more than 100,000 people injured. Most of the Gaza infrastructure and houses is totally destroyed, turned into rubble and ashes.

• 49:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Social media, like the internet, is often unreliable in Gaza. And in those moments, reporting like Enes's is one of the few ways the outside world learns what's happening in Gaza. It's why he got into journalism in the first place.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  I wanted to give the voices of the people here, the innocents who are often reduced to numbers or headlines.

• 50:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Enes told me, growing up in Gaza, he often felt like so much was beyond his control.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Because being a Gazan means that you are a cursed person. You were living in one of the biggest open-air prisons ever.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  They called us animals, and they are treating us less than an animal.

• 50:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  He has vivid memories of occupation and then a series of wars between Hamas and Israel.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  I saw the first tank in my life when I was six years old, and there was a curfew from the Israelis in my own neighborhood for five days. We lived without water, we lived without food, we lived without anything. So our childhood was always filled with blood, filled with suffer.

• 50:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  His father is a longtime photojournalist for AFP, a French news agency.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  So I was born with a camera on my own lap.

• 51:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Enes joined NPR because he wanted to bring the things he was witnessing to the outside world.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  There is nothing that drives me to keep going more and more, more than the people themselves, more than how resilient the Gazans are, because this is not something new for them. This is something that they lived from nineteen forty-eight, when the Israelis took control over Palestine and they killed our own ancestors and grandfathers. And after that, we just displaced to Gaza here.

• 51:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Have you ever felt at any point while you've been reporting like, you as someone who is a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, you were on the same level as a foreign journalist coming in?

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Okay, this is, this is a hard one, by the way. To be honest with my own environment and NPR, they are totally supportive. We are a tribe of journalists. We are Jews, we are Palestinians, we are Muslims, we are Christians. We are from Gaza, we are from Tel Aviv. So we cannot make our work environment poisoned. But many of other colleagues outside of NPR with other media outlets, they resigned because they felt biased from colleagues inside of the media outlet.

• 52:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Living in the US, consuming American media, you know, October seventh is invoked anytime that discussion about the destruction of Gaza comes up. And so I want to take a moment to actually talk about October seventh. And I'm curious to know what you remember about that day, October seventh, twenty twenty-three?

• 52:41Speaker 02

  The question is not, what do you remember? The question is, have you ever forgot that day?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  It was the, the day that truly turned our lives upside downs.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  That's no one in Gaza as civilians agreed on.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  But we are the ones as civilians that are being punished. One thousand two hundred Israelis killed that day. And Israel killed sixty thousand people.

• 53:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Is there a point where you think you would say,

• 53:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  I can't report on this anymore because, because it's my life at stake and, and I, I have to just get to safety and I have to, I have to leave?

• 53:39Speaker 02

  When I'm gonna leave Gaza?

• 53:44Speaker 02

  When all of this reaches an end, when Israel sees us as humans, when Israel treats us as humans,

• 53:57Speaker 02

  otherwise, I'm not going to leave Gaza. I was born in Gaza. I was raised in Gaza. I grew up in Gaza. I graduated in Gaza. I worked in Gaza.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  The history is being written. And now it's the time to stand with the right side of the history.

• 54:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  That was Enes Baba, NPR's reporter in Gaza.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 54:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by me.

• 54:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  And me and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

• 54:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes. Navid Marvi.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 55:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thank you to Al Jazeera, Daniel Estrin, Enes Baba, DeeDee Skanki, James Hyder, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancy, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Sturgie, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

• 55:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 55:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.